In the quiet of your office, working after everyone else has gone home, you take a look at the sales results from the latest catalog and there it is, GOOOAAAALLLLL!!! The cleaning crew is a little startled at your reaction, but the extra information you sent to Dirxion along with the catalog pages has paid off. Now you can attend the campaign summary meeting tomorrow morning with a clear ROI statement simply because you appended each product link with a unique campaign ID.

Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or one of the other e-commerce tracking options generally allow you
to create individual campaigns for tracking their performance. As is the case with Google Analytics, most of these options give you a tool to create unique parameters to add to your URL’s. When the Fall 2016 Catalog is ready to go online, you can use something like the Google URL Builder to create the appropriate add-on to your existing product URL. The result should look something like this, source=catalog&utm_campaign=lightingcatalogsupplement

When added to the catalog product links you can track the exact revenue coming out of the each digital catalog. Looking at the Conversions section in Google Analytics, you should see something like this.

Finally you go home for the evening knowing you have the right information that proves the value of the online catalog that Dirxion created for you.

Boring title right? Let’s break it down a little and see if we can get the juices flowing.LOCAL SEARCH– Our online directory platform available to any publisher that wants to provide a robust online advertising platform. It’s a fit for yellow page publishers, B2B directory publishers, supplier guides, specialty service directories, etc…V3– This is the next generation of our platform. We’ve already made several major changes over the last 2 years, but this is a completely new version. You know when they redesign a car that keeps the same name, but they call it all new, it’s like that, but without the marketing budget.SERP– Search Engine Results Page. These are your Google results, which I’m sure most think are simply separated into paid and free, but take a closer look then next time you search for a place to eat on a Friday night. It’s well explained on The Moz Blog, http://moz.com/blog/mega-serp-a-visual-guide-to-google. How you show up here is important. What does Google show when someone searches for your business? Does it draw in the users attention? Does it provide relevant information?Upgrade– Now we’re talking, but we are not promising. There’s all kind’s of companies out there that will sell you their secret formula for showing up on Google’s first page. Some of them may even work, but results can change quickly on Google and it can be tough to keep up. That’s not our gig. While our new platform does strictly adhere to SEO Best Practices, today, I simply want to share how we are handling videos in the search results. The new structure of the profile page allows the videos to show up in the search engine results. Just looking at this sample, you can see how this calls attention to the result with a video.

You can see the video result for Subway in Ellijay, GA.

The result with the video is for one of our customers local search site, www.hellonorthgeorgia.com. Perform a quick search for the importance of these things called video snippets and you’ll find all kinds of helpful information.

This is just one in the myriad of upgrades in V3. We will continue to share these, but please don’t hesitate to reach out at any time.

We appreciate our Local Search customers and understand the challenge their sales teams face in the trenches each day. So here’s a tidbit of info that may help before you head out to meet with your advertisers. That, or it simply allows you to better understand how people use your local search site. Without going into too much detail in a simple blog post, if you drill down to the Site Content portion of Google Analytics you’ll see a list of pages ranked by how many times they were viewed.

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Click on any of those pages and then look for the In-Page tab.

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Once you select that and give Google a few seconds to work, you’ll see the live version of that page with some additional information. This additional information represents the actions users took while on that page, which simply means if they clicked – where did they click and how many clicks? Hover over the percentage box and you’ll see the actual number of clicks. This can be used for the Home Page, the List Results Page, or the Profile Page. It’s best to search for the business name when looking for an advertiser profile page.

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Simple right? Well, maybe not, but that’s why we are here to help! Contact your sales manager to discuss how you can dig deeper into Google Analytics.

Creating your Google Account is step numero uno in reaching and tracking your digital edition traffic with Dirxion. No Google Account, no Analytics access. So let’s get you started.

Step 1.)

Open your browser and visit google.com/analytics. If you don’t use a Gmail or a Google docs account for work, and you don’t already have Analytics for another website, you are most likely going to need to create a new Google Account, so that’s where we go from here.

Step 2.)

In the small right sidebar click “Sign Up Now.”

Step 3.)

On the next page you will find yet another log in page. Déjà vu? No, this time the top box says “Sign Up Now.” Why do they make you do this twice? I have no idea, but they are Google and I’m just Brad Gorman, so they probably have a good reason.

Step 4.)

That link takes you to the Google Account sign up page. Under the field “Your current email address:” enter the email you want to use to access your Google Analytics account. This does not have to be a Gmail account. Most users choose to tie their analytics to their work emails, or any email address they’ve used with pre-existing Google services, like AdSense. Fill out the rest of the fields – Password, Location, Birthday, and match the Captcha phrase. When you are finished, click “I accept. Create my account.”

Step 5.)

You will be taken to an account creation confirmation screen. It tells you that an email has been sent to your chosen email account and that you need to open it and click the link to finish the process, so open the email they send you and click on that confirmation link.

Step 6.)

Creating the Google Account is 99% of the battle. From there, all you have to do is email us at analytics@dirxion.com, and we’ll take care of the rest. Please include the email address you used for your Google account and the name and/or URLs of the publications you’d like to measure using Analytics. We will send you an email that links back to google.com/analytics after we’ve connected your Google Account to your Analytics profiles. Once there, you may want to bookmark the page for future use.

Step 7.)

Click the “Access Analytics” button and you’re in. You should see one or multiple Analytics Accounts. If there are no accounts showing, then you will want to contact us. If you do see some, start exploring by clicking the hyperlinked account names to drill down further into individual profiles and then their data.

Once you’ve set up your account, you might take some time to view the following tutorials. These will help guide you through the process of generating some basic reports in Google Analytics.

This is the second post of an ongoing series of blog posts dedicated to discussing important information on Google Analytics, as it relates to your digital edition. Today, I will talk about where you can view which URLs users are clicking in your publication and the total number of clicks each URL is receiving.

When you log in to Google Analytics, you should see your Dashboard. If not, proceed to your Dashboard by clicking ‘Dashboard’ in the navigation menu on the left.

To view URL clicks, first go to your Event Tracking Overview page. To do this, click ‘Content’ and then ‘Event Tracking’ in the navigation menu on the left. Below is a screen where various “events” are tracked. URL clicks are considered an event labeled as ‘PageLink.’ In most cases, the PageLink event should always be the top event in your Event Tracking Overview page. To view only URL clicks, simply click on ‘View all’ in the ‘Top Events’ area of the page inside the ‘Page Link’ pane.

Once you click ‘View all’, you should be taken to a screen that looks like the one below. This page shows you URL click totals for each specific section of your site. So if you are a directory customer, it should list your various directories. If you are a catalog customer, it should list each of your catalogs.

This screen is very useful for giving you an overall summary of how many URL clicks each section of your site is receiving. Even more useful is being able to see exactly which URLs are clicked. This is done by simply clicking on one of the ‘Event Actions.’

Once you are viewing the ‘Event Actions,’ you should see a specific break down of all the links that have been clicked in each specific section of your site. For catalog customers, this should consist of the different product links that are clicked. For directories, you should see a list of all the URLs within your listings and ads that users have clicked.

This stat would be used in different ways depending on what type of publication you have. For directories, it is useful for seeing which advertisers are getting the most traffic in your directory. For catalogs, it can help to identify which products are most popular in your catalog. You can even see the dates when each of these URL clicks took place. To do this, simply click on one of the URLs in the ‘Event Label’ column.

You should again see a graph that charts that specific URL click day by day. For a statistic nerd like me, it is very fun to see if there is any correlation between day of the week and the types of products purchased on certain days.

Well that is all for today. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more tips on Google Analytics. As always, feel free to drop me a line analytics@dirxion.com if you are having trouble finding/understanding any statistic.

*Please note your publication must be in version 7.3.2 or higher in order for these events to be tracked.

This is going to be an ongoing series of blog posts dedicated to discussing important information on Google Analytics, as it relates to your digital edition. Today, I will talk about how to view your publication’s page view statistics.

You should be on your Dashboard when you first log in to Google Analytics. If not, go to your Dashboard by clicking ‘Dashboard’ in the navigation menu on the left.

To view your page views, simply click ‘Pageviews’ in the Site Usage pane of your Dashboard.

From there you should see a screen displaying information about the page views for your site. You should see a day by day breakdown below a graph, which will display which days saw a greater amount of page views in comparison to other days in the date range.

You can always change the date range on any of these screens in Google Analytics by clicking on the area where the date range is displayed.

That is useful for looking at your entire site as a whole; however, what if you only want to see one specific part of your site’s page view information?

From the Dashboard, click on ‘Content’ in the navigation menu.

In the Content Overview screen, click ‘Pageviews,’ located underneath the graph.

Now you should be in a screen like the one below. It should display a title called ‘Top Content’ and display a page view graph similar to the one you saw previously.

This is where you can specify to view a particular part of your publication’s online elements. At the bottom of the screen you should see a search box with the phrase ‘Filter Page:.’ This search box is where you can specify which part of your publication you’d like to view. Let’s say you are a customer that publishes phone books in a lot of different areas but you only want to see the page view information for your St. Louis phone book. Simply type “St. Louis” in the search box and hit ‘Go.’ The same could work if you only wanted to view Yellow Pages information by typing “St. Louis Yellow Pages.” This works for all customer types. If you are a catalog customer and only want to see the information for your Fall 2010 catalog you would simply type “Fall 2010” in the search box.

A noteworthy and useful area on this screen is the ‘% of Site Total.’ This tells you what percentage of total page views this particular section of your site/digital edition(s) is getting.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more tips on Google Analytics. Feel free to drop me a line analytics@dirxion.com if you are having trouble finding/understanding any statistic.

For Dirxion customers who are currently taking advantage of using Google Analytics for advanced reporting and tracking; below you’ll find a few outstanding tutorial videos which will help you maximize the true potential of Google Analytics.